Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is heartening that, after a decade, Australia has reversed its downward trend on corruption. Transparency International released its rankings at the end of January this year, showing that Australia's ranking is now 13, increasing five spots from 18 last year, halting a decade of decline which bottomed out under the previous government. Scandal after scandal, rorts, politically stacked public institutions, culminating in the multiple ministries saga. Australia was on the slippery slope towards an autocracy. However, the reprieve was short lived, with sordid details now emerging on a daily basis from the robodebt royal commission. The executive arm of the previous government casually adopted a don't look, don't see attitude, paid cursory attention to legal advice and, armed with a dirt file, plotted to intimidate and discredit critics, because that's how they did business. Power in a moral vacuum allowed substandard behaviour to flourish because there were no consequences—until constituents in Higgins and elsewhere in Australia said, 'Enough.'

My constituents are watching with growing disgust and, in the same measure, relief that those opposite are gone from government. One can only imagine that the architects of this scheme and their enablers are living on borrowed time in this House. Those vulnerable Australians, the victims of robodebt, have stories. Many were my patients. They were people who had fallen on hard times, from relationship breakdowns to job losses, spiralling addiction, untreated mental illness or consumed by bereavement. They washed up on my daily ward rounds. They were people who lived in Higgins, from all walks of life, young and old, who needed a safety net until they found their feet again. My hospital was their destination of last resort in their moment of crisis. It galls me that these people were fodder for a cold, calculating crusade of warped ideology and values waged by the former government. Nobody likes a bully, especially when that bully co-opts the Commonwealth bureaucracy to do its bidding, to intimidate and cower.

Posterity will remember the royal commission into robodebt as an exemplar of power in a moral vacuum. While the Albanese government has improved Australia's reputation on corruption by legislating a National Anti-Corruption Commission, we recognise that even we have limitations. We cannot legislate a heart in government. Miracle workers, we ain't. The passage of the NACC at the end of last year represents a legacy of reform of the Albanese government. While the nation breathed a sigh of relief with its passage, the NACC is the centrepiece in an overarching integrity agenda that has received only piecemeal attention.

The Attorney-General's earliest reform was actually to the Australian Human Rights Commission, ensuring commissioners were appointed through a merit based transparent process, a perversion of process with little regard to competency or transparency, along the familiar lines of more jobs for mostly mediocre mates by successive Liberal governments, threatened to downgrade the Human Rights Commission's A status. This was a damning indictment of Liberal mismanagement, which went to the heart of how we see ourselves in the world, as a beacon of freedom, so that, as Kennedy said, 'Man can go to his full stature.' That flourishing that Kennedy alluded to does not happen when human rights are stifled. We have restored independence to the Australian Human Rights Commission in order to—wait for it—protect the human rights of Australians rather than the political agenda of the prevailing government.

We have also started a long overdue review of all secrecy provisions in the Commonwealth legislation. We are particularly concerned as to whether existing laws adequately protect press freedom, which is why the Albanese government is convening a roundtable with media organisations. Journalists should feel free to do their job without fear of going to jail.

I started with the NACC, and I will circle back to it. Deterrence of corruption is one aspect, but preventing it from taking root is the ideal, and that means making our public institutions hostile to this cancer. Hardening the system to corruption should, however, spare its heart, because public institutions, after all, like their political masters, are there to serve the people with equal parts of head and heart.

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